Stiglitz

Since the fifth and most recent BRICS summit, which took place in March 2013 in Durban, South Africa, the unified participation of the «fivesome» (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) in international affairs has become even more noticeable. And it is no exaggeration to say that Russia is playing the role of the conceptual leader of BRICS... The main event of the BRICS summit in South Africa was the politically-motivated decision to create a BRICS Development Bank... The idea of creating the BRICS Development Bank started from a simple fact: the West blocked the redistribution of votes (country quotas) in the IMF to reflect changes in the relative economic weight of certain states...

Even if we accept that there was a plausible military imperative to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – to bring about a swift defeat of Japan and thus an end to the Pacific War – the horror of civilian death toll from those two no-warning aerial attacks places a disturbing question over the supposed ends justifying the means...